Abstract
Residential and commercial buildings in the United States consume 73% of all electricity generated. Demand charges (i.e. “peak usage”) can account for 30-70% of a utility bill and continue to grow even as energy prices are decreasing, due largely in part to adoption of intermittent renewables and less efficient, more costly generation assets which must be brought online during peak demand. In order to quantitatively assess business value and either enhance existing or propose new programs for utilities, the ability to detect, generate, and simulate a building energy model has been applied to a 1,385 km2 utility district involving over 160,000 buildings in a smart grid backed by a fiber optic network. The organization operating the electrical distribution and fiber optic networks has prioritized and guided the creation of a virtual utility in order to assess a prioritized list of potential revenue streams and determine the most cost-effective programs for their organization and their rate-payers. We provide an overview of the technical capabilities developed for generally-applicable urban-scale building energy modeling to any geographical area and the utility-defined use cases being assessed.
